Who are the most sought-after and best-paid developers in 2021?

For the fourth year, CodinGame publishes its annual survey. Inventory of the job market for developers for 2021: languages most coveted by recruiters, sectors that pay the best ...
Nearly 15,000 developers and 300 recruiters around the world responded to the Codingame recruitment platform's survey in the last quarter of 2020. The French market is well represented, accounting for 25% of the professionals surveyed and 50% of the business panel.

First observation: developers are rather very confident. When asked about their level of confidence in being able to change jobs in 2021, developers gave an average score of 7 on a scale of 0 to 10. The same confidence index as last year, as if the crisis had no impact on their job prospects.

A confidence that can be explained by the continuing high need for these profiles. It turns out that the majority of companies (64%) plan to recruit up to 50 developers this year, according to the study. However, the demand varies greatly depending on the technologies, and the salaries are felt on the salaries.
Programming languages Javascript, Java, Python in the lead
For the third consecutive year, JavaScript, Java and Python are the programming tools most used by tech professionals, with more than half of the developers mastering these three languages. However, nearly 60% of recruiters have major recruitment needs on Javascript and Java.

On the other hand, with regard to other languages such as Python, C or C++, there is a strong imbalance between the skills required and those in demand. Thus, 45.1% of developers code in C, but only 15.4% of companies have development needs in C.

It should be noted that there are fewer and fewer typical career paths to get to this job, and recruiters are increasingly interested in atypical profiles. More than 80% of them say they recruit developers who do not have a diploma, and more than one in three professionals consider themselves to be self-taught, trained via MOOCs, bootcamps, or other short training courses.
Positions with contrasting salaries

There are wide wage disparities between the various programming occupations. Software architects are the highest paid tech professionals with an average annual salary of $74,585. On the other hand, test developers or front-end developers earn an average of $34,946 per year.

Disparities between professions are also visible in the supply-demand ratio. For example, while nearly half of the HR staff believe that they will have difficulty recruiting qualified DevOps profiles, only 13% have the same concerns when it comes to recruiting business analysts.

Security in pole position of the highest paying sectors

Salaries for tech professionals fluctuate widely depending on the sector of activity. The highest paid developers work in the security industry with an average salary around $56,000.

A difference of nearly $15,000 is noted with professionals who work in lower paying sectors such as public administration or IT service companies.